Monday, January 27, 2014

When I turn around from standing in front
of my closet to check the time, I see it’s 6:43 a.m. I’ve been rooted here in
my underwear for a solid six minutes—far too long. This was supposed to be
easy. It’s Friday, which means I get to wear my favorite faded blue jeans and
my solid navy blue cotton shirt. The question has been which tie should go with
them. Even though it’s early in the semester, I’ve already gone through some of
my favorites—the one with Beatles album covers, the one with the Gettysburg
Address, the Van Gogh “Starry Night.” What’s left? There’s Shrek, but that goes
better with my black or khaki jeans. Ditto for the Chinese food. I love that
Paul Klee my wife bought for me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last summer,
but that would be cheating, since I wore it the first week of school. There’s
Superman, which gets lots positive comments, but I always feel a little immodest
wearing it, as if I’m implying I’m
Superman. I could go for a more low-key approach—red polka dots on a field of
royal blue, or the metallic paisley of red, blue and silver. But today is a
full day, and since I’m teaching most of my classes, I’d like to don something
from my A list.

Ah ha—I remember I’m giving a unit test
in my Humanities course today. I finger my way through one of the racks on the
closet wall looking for tie I have with the pair of dice. I’ll imply taking a
test is a game of chance. On my way there, though I encounter something even
better: Edward Munch’s “The Scream.” Now that
seems apropos for a test. Let’s see if anyone gets the joke.

* * *

Schools have varying rules about couture
for faculty as well as students, but one way or another everybody wears a
uniform. When left to their own devices, teachers usually opt for the informal,
men (as usual) having more leeway, principally in the form of less censure for
slovenliness. Sometimes, clothes make an ideological statement, most commonly
when teachers express affirm their class politics by dressing down. Other
times, fashion reflects complacency, if not sloth: my job is secure, and
there’s no one I need to impress. Very often, it’s a matter of pragmatism; in a
job where you spend a lot of time on your feet, sensible shoes (even athletic
shoes) prevail. Of course, these and other motives mingle, as do manifold
exceptions. But teachers rarely dress like doctors or lawyers, and while few
are foolish enough to chase adolescent style, the choices of students do exert
a gravitational pull, which is precisely why some schools to impose rules on
both (and why both will try to stretch them).

I’m a fairly typical specimen in this
regard. In the first years of my job as a high school teacher, I wore khakis, a
dress shirt, a tie and work shoes. More recently, I’ve lapsed back toward jeans
and cords, clinging to the shoes and (especially) the ties, which have become
more colorful as my shirts have turned toward earth tones. The ties have become
my signature—most of my large and growing collection are gifts, and I only
half-jokingly call them anti-soporific devices. They’re like a shaft of
personality I allow to escape my otherwise unprepossessing visage.

The act of getting dressed in the
morning—in particular, the act of threading my belt and filling my pockets—is
one of the most satisfying rituals of my day. There’s a fixed sequence: keys on
the left, phone on the right, comb back left and wallet back right. Pillbox
with the keys; mints in the change pocket. I glide a lacquered pen (another
indulgence) into my shirt pocket. My watch clips onto a belt loop, a legacy of
carpel tunnel syndrome. So does my photo ID, a requirement that followed in the
wake of school shootings and a reminder of the price we pay in prioritizing the
freedom of gun owners over that of children. But I’d be lying if I didn’t
confess that my I regard that plastic card as a satisfying piece of girding for
the day’s labor. Sometimes as I dress I imagine the lipstick rolling, the
shirts buttoning, and the boots zipping as my fellow travelers converge on the
building we share.

Among contemporary multicultural
educators and consultants, there’s a discourse about the problem of students
(and, in some cases, faculty) having to “check your identity at the door.” This
discourse addresses the fact that there’s often a minority—racial, sexual,
socioeconomic, religious, disabled—that feels obliged to conform to the
dominant culture of a school, and to downplay, even deny, the realities of
their own lives. This conflict continues when they return home, as they
navigate the gap between their communities of origin and the ones they’re being
socialized to join—“code-switching,” in the lingo of multiculturalists. In some
schools, administrators and parents strive to close this gap through tools like
quiet subsidies for field trips, creating student affinity groups, and the
like.

At the risk of some presumption, I’ll say
that I have at least some idea about what these people are trying to do,
because as an undergraduate scholarship student with growing awareness that
many of peers lived decidedly different lives than I did, I experienced such
tensions first-hand. I don’t insist they be embraced or passively accepted by
students or those trying to help them. That said, I believe there are times and
ways when there is nothing more liberating than checking your self at the door.
When I enter a building literally bearing my identity as a teacher, the school
logo trumps the idiosyncrasies of my face and all the other particularities of
my life, among them that tie, an affectation likely to be ignored by others and
forgotten by myself. Once I’m at work, I have a set of privileges and
responsibilities that offer the promise of relief from self-consciousness. That
promise isn’t always realized, of course, as often because I sabotage it as
because outside forces (like a phone call from home) disrupt it.Still, the mere prospect is among the
most precious assets of the gainfully employed.

Students also savor checking their
identities at the door and becoming members of mass, whether it’s that of a
school, a class, or a member of a team. (Is there any talisman of collective
identity more savored than those of the team jersey or varsity jacket?) There’s
a long and dishonorable history of students being denied this experience, one
that should be remembered and actively resisted. But this is a problem of
exclusion, not suppression.

One of the most valuable aspects of
checking your identity at the door is the way your memory of having done so
remains with you after you’ve checked out. In some respects this is
humbling—the person in that bathrobe you see in the mirror is usually a good
deal less impressive than the one you see after you get dressed. A similar
laxity extends to behavior. More than once I’ve winced, after yelling at my
kids or doing something else I regretted, when I imagined my students
witnessing what I’ve just said or done. Ironically, playing a role can keep you
honest.

It also has its guilty pleasures. When I was
the father of young children and subject to the demands of that role, the promise of a working day at school felt like
freedom. Days or weeks off—and the absence of daycare that usually accompanied
them—loomed large. These days, I savor a holiday or three-day weekend as much
as any of my colleagues, even if my pastimes are of the most quotidian kind.
But pending burdens, like long-term illness or the aging parents, are always
around to remind me that a job can feel like a vacation.

Each of us is a repertory company: we’re
not really functional, much less happy, unless we’re playing a variety of
parts. And changing costumes. Most of the time, we’re handed our scripts. The
rest is a matter of interpretation—and impersonation.

* * *

“Ooooh, ‘The Scream’—I love it,” my colleague Denise
Richardson, who teaches English, tells me while we wait on line for a cup of
coffee before the first class of the day. “Feeling a little suicidal today,
Horace?”

“Nope. Test this afternoon.”

“How lovely. I’m sure your students will
appreciate your solicitude.”

But they don’t seem to notice. When I
enter the room most of the girls seem freaked out, poring over study guides and
querying each other on the main provisions of the Mayflower Compact. I’m asked
a few stray questions, which I answer as I arrange desks into rows, something I
suspect reassures some of the students even as it may frustrate others. The
exam goes off without a hitch; I’m asked leading or inane questions by students
seeking to wring a few points out of me (“What does ‘predestination’ mean?”;
“When you say ‘the Virginia Company’ do you mean a business or just a group of
people trying to make money?”), which I try to deflect the best I can.

The last person to finish is Kim Anders,
who’s double- (or triple-, or quadruple-) checking her work even as students
are gathering just beyond the closed door, peering in as a hint that it’s time
for her to clear out so they can get in for the next class.

“I saw that painting recently at the
Museum of Modern Art,” she says, gesturing at my tie as she approaches me at
the front of the room. “I went with my Dad. What’s his name—Edward Mensch?”

“Munch.”

“‘The Scream,’ right?”

“Right.”

“Is that supposed to be joke?”

“Kinda.”

Kim nods, mirthlessly. Then she walks
over to the door, puts her hands to her ears, and issues a brief, punctuated
scream: “HAAAA!” The kids on the other side flinch. After the initial terror, a
few laugh; others look at her angrily.

Kim she looks back at me as she opens the
door to exit. “Thanks, Mr. Dewey.”

“For what? You like taking tests?”

Kim squints, considering the question.
“Ummm, I dunno. The tie, I guess. I like it.”

“I should be thanking you,” I say with a
smile. But Kim has already disappeared amid the incoming tide.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

In
which we finesse the occupational hazard of keeping student names straight

The Secret Life of Teaching, #1 (first published at the History News Network)

By Horace Dewey

My name is
Horace Dewey, and I am a high school history teacher at the East Hudson School
in New York City. Actually, no—in fact my name is not Horace Dewey, though I really am a high school history teacher (East Hudson is fictive).
As you will surely surmise, my pseudonym has symbolic significance. “Dewey” is
an act of homage to John Dewey, the 20th century patron saint of
progressive education. You might think that “Horace” is a nod toward Horace
Mann, the 19th century architect of the modern public school system,
an allusion I won’t disavow. But my first name is actually a tribute to
education reformer Theodore Sizer (1932-2009) and author of renowned “Horace
trilogy” (1984 -1996).

Because
I have the privacy of students to protect, names and situations have been
changed. I have also resorted to outright invention in a few cases, though
everything I describe is rooted in more than a quarter-century’s experience of
classroom teaching. My credibility lies in the truth of my storytelling.

—H.D.

“Excellent, Kim. The family structure—or
maybe I should say the lack of family
structure—in Virginia is indeed one of the distinguishing features between New
England and the South in the seventeenth century. What are some other
differences?”

Two hands go up. One is Sam Stevens, but
he’s already spoken too many times today. Uneasy about it, I gesture toward the
other kid. “Go ahead—”

Shit!
What’s his name?

“—Yes. You. Go right ahead.”

This is embarrassing. He knows I don’t
know. And so does everybody else. Keep going—you’ve fumbled, but we’re already
on to the next play.

“ . . . and the Southern economy is about
cotton,” mystery kid is saying.

Bluff.
“Yes, good, except that
at this point the Chesapeake is really about tobacco, not cotton. Cotton won’t
come until much later. Yes, Cara? What do you think?”

Off
she goes. Cara tends to unspool for a while before getting to the point.
Normally, this is exasperating. But now it gives me a chance to regroup.

It’s week two of the new school year, and
the ship whereby I can keep asking kids to identify themselves has already
sailed. I’ve got most of them. But there are a couple (Adam Kirby? Who the hell is he? And who’s the other dirty-blonde kid
in the corner?) who elude me. But I’ve got
to get back in the saddle. Which is going to be hard, because I have no clue
what Cara just said.

Phew.
Wilhelmina’s raising her hand. Port in a storm.

“What do you think, Willie?”

“Well, I just want to add on to what Adam
said—”

Adam!
Yes! So the other one looking at the clock must be Chris.

Silence: Willie’s done. They’re waiting
on me. “Good, Willie.”

I
wasn’t paying attention to her.Is that a smirk on Jack Altieri’s face?
He’s such a prick. So was his brother. Into Duke on his daddy’s checkbook. “So let me ask you this, gang. If you
were a nineteen year-old boy in 1625, where do you think you would rather
go—“colonial Williamsburg or colonial Plymouth?”Sam’s
hand goes up again. I nod at him. Finally.
On track.

The only question now is whether I’ll be
able to keep Adam and Chris straight this time tomorrow morning. The odds, I
think grimly, are 50-50. But on his way out the door, I make a point of saying,
“take care, Adam.” Maybe that will buy me a little good will? “OK,” he says. “Schmuck,”
he thinks.

* * *

There are many complex relationships in
public life that blend the personal and professional in ways that defy easy
description. But there’s nothing quite like the dance of intimacy and formality
between student and teacher. No teacher who connects emotionally with students
will ever be considered a failure by them: something
will be learned, and long remembered, whatever the teacher’s competence in a
given subject. But no teacher can be an effective educator without sustaining a
discrete distance from students, emotional and otherwise. Finding the balance
between the two is an unending life’s work.

Students always learn in multiple ways.
But it remains a truism that students learn best when they work with a teacher
that knows them (their first teachers, of course, are their parents).This of course begs the question of
what it means to “know” a student. The most superficial answer is being able to
match a name and a face—which is not superficial at all as far as many students
are concerned: if you can’t remember my name, why should I remember anything
you tell me? It may be a misguided question, but it’s there all the same, and no
teacher who hopes to be effective can long ignore it.

A second level of knowing is similarly
superficial, and at the same time even more important: the impression you have
of the student as a student. This is
often a perception that takes shape even before you know their names: sharp or
dull; active or passive; charming or abrasive. (I don’t mean to link these
adjectives; sometimes the ones you suspect are smartest hang back, for
example.) Oftentimes you pick such impressions up unconsciously, taking your
cue from body language, diction, the glaze of an eye. These sensory perceptions
can prove quite accurate once you begin to see their work or talk with your
colleagues about them. Then again, they may not.

Right or wrong, your initial perceptions
often prove significant—and not always in a good way. Once I get a sense of a
kid as a B student, for example, it becomes harder—not impossible, but
harder—for that kid to get an A, in part because I try to ration the As and am
often looking for reasons to deny them in an effort to maintain a sense of
standards: I want those As to actually mean something, if for no other reason
than a kid who gets one will feel she has earned something. I’m not usually conscious of being easier or tougher on
kids I don’t perceive as especially bright—or more lenient on kids I like for
one reason or another—but on some level I know this must be true. At the same
time, my self-image also requires me to show myself that I’m capable of
revising my perceptions of a kid. So it is that we see through a glass darkly.

Knowledge of a student is also socially
constructed, which is to say the product of perceptions of others you have no
way of verifying, but which you nevertheless absorb directly or indirectly.
Some reputations reside in the student body: he’s a jock; she’s a slut; they’re
geeks. Constructing and maintaining a persona is one of the most important
tasks of childhood and (especially) adolescence, and one valuable indicator of
intelligence is how effective a student is in modulating social equilibrium
with peers and adults, and toggling between them.

One’s colleagues are also an important
source of data about students. Some of this is in the official realm of report
cards and other feedback that are part of a student’s scholastic record. More
often, information is anecdotal, varying greatly in its degree of legitimacy,
even propriety. There are times when gossip is genuinely helpful; it may lead
one to see a student’s behavior in a larger pattern or context, and in some
cases lead you to make allowances you might not otherwise make (his parents are
going through a divorce) or take more forceful action (you mean he’s done that
to you, too?).

But amid all this contextual knowledge of
students, there are also avenues of that can be startlingly direct, even
personal. The most obvious form is student writing. For the most part, grading
student essays is an unpleasant task, in large part because students say
predictable things badly. But every once in a while I’ll be surprised by a
revelation of how a student actually thinks that’s arresting for its candor,
insight, or both. Even bad writers can convey a disposition or an ideology,
whether they intend to reveal it or not. So it is that I occasionally learn
just how narcissistic, narrow-minded, empathic or insightful a kid can be.
Sometimes I finish reading an essay just liking a student so much, marveling at
an inexplicably attained preternatural wisdom and thinking how marvelous it
would be to be that person’s friend. I’m reminded of that line from that
adolescent perennial, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher
in the Rye: “What really
knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the
author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up
on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

But of course I can’t be such a student’s
friend—not in that way, at least. I will on occasion seek strike up a
conversation with a kid about weekend plans, the meaning of a slogan on a
T-shirt, hoping something interesting will shake out in the conversation that
follows. Under certain circumstances, like walking together on a field trip, I
might go further and ask the kid about what the parents do for a living, what
schools the kid attended previously, and other biographical details.
Occasionally, a student will turn the tables and ask me such questions, which
I’ll reluctantly answer, even as my esteem for the kid goes up a notch.

Every
once in a while I’ll find myself in among a klatch of students and manage to
fade into the woodwork as they talk among themselves. It’s in moments like
these that I get a better sense of their standing among each other. There may
come a moment when I’m drawn into the conversation—I’ll agree that this
musician really is awful or that movie was quite good—and for the briefest
moment our respective different social positions will vanish. For me these
moments are tenuous and brief—they tended to be tenuous and brief when I was an
adolescent, too—but I’ve never tried very hard to do much better in this regard.
The truth is that I don’t really want to be all that close to these kids. Most
of the time I can’t really listen to them for more than fifteen minutes or so
without getting restless. Part of this is envy—I don’t want to press my nose
against the glass—and part of is the knowledge that I have happily left some of
the work they’re doing happily behind.

Some
of my colleagues finesse these interactions with more effortlessly than I do.
They seem to be able to tease, scold, cajole, even touch students and have it
seem natural, and they can self-disclose with unselfconscious ease. And they do
all this without compromising their integrity or authority. Such people, who
are almost always a minority in a school, are indispensable. They’re not
necessarily good teachers in the conventional sense of the term. But they’re
excellent educators, and can make a deeper, more lasting impression than the
most dedicated or brilliant instructor.

The
final, essential point to be made here that the information between student and
teacher flows in two directions. All the ways I’ve been describing in which a
teacher comes to know a student—facial recognition, initial impressions,
community reputation, written communication, observed and direct
conversation—also apply to the way a student comes to know a teacher. Indeed,
many teachers are “known” to a student long a teacher has any idea who a
student is. Individual student opinions can be idiosyncratic, conflicting, and
poorly articulated. But the composite picture is usually reasonably
accurate—or, at any rate, often no less so than the reputation a teacher has
among peers.

Sometimes,
a student will teach you things about yourself. This might happen when you jump
to a conclusion with a kid who calls you on it, when you get a back-handed
compliment that pains you in ways that weren’t intended, or when you realize
that your issues with a particular kid have uncomfortable affinities with other
kids in a specific demographic. Addressing such problems is not always easy,
and actually correcting them may be impossible. But such feedback can be
helpful in checking your impulses and sidestepping at least some mistakes.

Every
once in a while you get a gift. Some years back I barked at a student who I
felt was dragging her heels on doing her homework. This student didn’t seem
particularly engaged by my class, though I recognized an underlying
intelligence—she had a real sense of style that modulated an understated
beauty—and I knew that she was highly regarded by faculty and students as a singer
and visual artist. But at that moment I was just annoyed. Later, I learned that
my immediate reason for my ire rested on a misunderstanding. But even before
that, I knew I’d been unfair—I’d just been diagnosed as diabetic, and I’d taken
my distraction and irritability out on her. So I sent her an email to apologize
and explain my outburst. “I knew something was wrong,” she told me the next day
when I ran into her in an empty hallway. “That just wasn’t like you.” I found
her compassion unexpected and moving, and it led me to disclose that my fear of
aging had gotten the best of me. When I paid a visit to the college she went on
to attend, I made a point of contacting her and we had a lovely brief chat. I’m
not sure I’ll ever see her again (except on facebook—I do a mass friending of
graduating seniors each June—and she surfaces from time to time). But I’ll
always feel a tie to her.

Indeed,
a great dividend of teaching is your former students. Sometimes—especially in
the short term—relations with them can be awkward, because they come back from
college all breathless and eager to speak with you, and you’re still deeply
immersed in a world they’ve left behind (a reality I imagine is likely to
inspire alternating relief and melancholy). But as they ripen into adults you
can lower your guard a little and converse with them in a manner that
approaches that of peers. Sometimes, their affection for you is unstinting even
as they surely see, perhaps with newfound clarity, the contours of your limits.
They understand amid their own creeping mortality that it’s important to honor
vitality, however partial, wherever they find it (even if only in memory).

In
the end, the most important curriculum a teacher will ever study is the student
body. In time, the appeal of any given formal curriculum will fade. But as long
as you find the students interesting—as long as they entertain, bemuse, provoke
or enlighten—you’ll have something worthwhile to do.

* * *

“Mr.
Dewey!”

“Ella!”
We embrace at the top of the stairs near my office. “How are you? How is
Wesleyan?”

“Great!
You look great!”

“So
do you.” She’s lying; I’m not. A woman, not a girl. Short hair is better. The
winter coat she’s got on is smashing. The scarf adds a splash of red.

“What
are you now, a junior?”

“A
senior. Can you believe it?”

“No,
but that’s how these things go, Ella. By the way, call me Horace.”

She brightens again. “Great! Catherine
graduated from Amherst two years ago and is applying to law school for next
fall. Eddie is working for Goldman Sachs.”

“And you turned out to be a History
major—I remember from your last visit.”

“And I turned out to be a History major,”
she repeats wistfully. “I’m thinking about graduate school.”

“In History? God forbid, kiddo. You’ve
got better things to do.”

“Do I?” A retort laced with self-doubt.
“I had a second major in East Asian Studies. I went to China last year. I’m
looking into doctoral programs.”

Yikes. Time to backtrack. “Well if
anybody could get a professorship in this market, it would be you.” I mean it.
She was a wonderful student.

“I’m also thinking public history or
material culture. I’ve got something lined up for this summer at the Met.”

“Good for you.”

“It’s your fault, you know,” she says,
breaking into a smile and shaking a finger a gloved finger at me. “Tenth grade.
You got me hooked. And it was that paper on the Boxer Rebellion that got me
interested in Chinese history.”

“You did a nice job with that.”

“And how about you?” she asks after a
pause. “How are things going here?”

“Oh, you know. Same old stuff.”

We’re running out of steam. “Anyway,” she
says, gliding her coat sleeve back with one hand so she can see check her watch
on the other. “I’ve got to run. But I just wanted to come by and say hello.”

“I’m glad you did. Say hi to your
family.”

“I will,” she says, as we hug again.
“Great to see you, Mr. Dewey—I mean Horace.”

“Likewise, Ella. Take care.”

Only after I cease to hear the click of
her boots do I remember that her name isn’t Ella.

Friday, January 17, 2014

In Rome: An Empire's Story, Greg Woolf manages to compress 15 centuries into an elegant span of 300 pagesThe following review has been posted on the Books page of the History News Network.

It seems fitting that a short book about the rise and fall of the Roman empire is a triumph of engineering. Greg Woolf distills 1500 years of history, bisected by the birth of Jesus Christ, into exactly 300 pages of main text, cased with a robust editorial apparatus. He accomplishes this with eighteen chapters that alternate between narrative history and a thematic overviews that include the ecology of the Mediterranean basin, the role of slavery, Roman religion, and other topics. (Oddly, one omission is a chapter on Roman engineering, a surprising oversight given the magnitude and durability of its accomplishments.) The effect of this book is a squared circle: Woolf surveys a history that is very difficult to grasp as a whole, and yet also manages to suggest a sense of texture and continuity in the values, institutions, and practices that stitched together a world for a remarkably long time.

With a similar sense of economy and leverage, Woolf endows his narrative with an interpretive dimension that rests on the indefinite article of its subtitle: an Empire's story. When it comes to the Romans, Woolf is not an exceptionalist. He is able to repeatedly and convincingly juxtapose any number of practices -- tax policy, war-making, identity formation -- with reference to earlier and later empires around the globe, both contemporary to Rome and those temporally on either side of it. He sees the key of Rome's success is the way in which the ad-hoc conquests of the late Republic, culminating in the career of Julius Caesar, gave way to the tributary empire of Augustus, in which an army loyal to the emperor maintained civil as well as military stability. This stability was severely tested in the third century CE, but successfully reorganized before a series of waves eroded and finally broke it down, a gradual process culminating with the the rise of Islam in the seventh century. This is not an original argument, of course, as Woolf, a professor of Ancient History at St. Andrews and the editor of The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Roman World, readily makes clear. Indeed, his masterful sense of historiography suggests a lifetime of learning worn lightly. But his assertion that it's Rome survival, not its fall, that's hardest to explain is a point worth remembering.

Rome: An Empire's Story was first published in 2012 and has just been reissued in a paperback edition. It was clearly conceived as a textbook adoption, as suggested by chapters that end with sections for further reading. But it has the ease and scope of a trade book, as admiring reviews from the likes of the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley suggests. It's hard to imagine a better introduction to the subject.

Friday, January 10, 2014

The following is the last segment of my 2013 Heyburn Lecture, delivered this month at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. Previous segments are below.

In affirming the power of history, I want to spell out two
things I’m not talking about. The
first, a common misconception among non-historians, is that history is about
facts. In some sense, of course, facts matter: they’re the very tissue of
history, the stuff of which it is made. But facts alone are never sufficient,
which is to say that facts almost never tell you the truth. For one thing,
facts are always finite: you never quite have enough of them when it comes down
to things you really want to know. Simultaneously, facts are so plentiful that
there’s always the question of which
facts are being used, and how. Sometimes, when I talk with my students about an
essay assignment, they will tell me what they want to “prove” in their papers,
at which point I correct them: in history we prove nothing. All we can really do is try to persuade each other about the way the world really works.

So don’t put your faith in facts. Which brings me to the
other kind of historical knowledge I’m not particularly interested in pressing
here, one that modern historians really do
see as central to their craft: making arguments. For the last 125 years or so,
actually, success in my profession has been about constructing an interpretive version of American history, an analytic
model, for which to understand a
particular person, place – or, especially in recent decades, process. That version or model,
constructed with conscious awareness of other, competing ones, is meant to be
understood as resonant: the case
study standing in for a larger whole. It is understood that the successful,
which is to say persuasive, historian makes such arguments using the language
and methods of reason, logic, evidence, and other precepts of the sciences from
which modern historical writing has borrowed so much of its prestige. Do that
and you will be described with highest term of term of esteem in the
profession: influential.

Of course, I, too, am engaged in an act of persuasion, and
I too hope you’ll see a logic in what I say here that you can apply to many
more things than I happen to talk about today. But I understand my role here a
little differently than those in the academic history business. It’s taken me a
while to figure this out, but I think I’ve arrived at a place where I see my
job as something closer to a village elder relating pieces of family lore. The
stories I tell – and, yes, I do think that stories are, as they’ve always been,
the very core of history – are not be original, complete, or objective. I
acknowledge that you have other members of the village (other teachers,
parents, friends) who see the matter differently, and I encourage you to seek
them out as well. But if I do my job right, you’ll want to hear my version of
the story, because it will help you make sense of your experience in the
broadest sense: who you are, where you’ve come from, and what parts of your
heritage can inform what you do or don’t do next with your life.

Your job in all of this is to learn how to listen. That may
sound like I’m telling you to be obedient children. I’m not. And I understand
that there are few things more difficult to actually sit still and remain
attentive while some old white guy drones on for a half-hour when there are so
many other things you would rather be doing. Honestly, you have my sympathy.
And I know I lost some of you in this lecture a long time ago, and I don’t
blame you. But if you’re still with me, and if there’s anything you’re still
willing to hear from me, it would be this: Listen actively. Give people –
teachers, little sisters, big brothers, supermarket checkout clerks, whoever –
a chance to have their say. More than that, ask them questions based on what
they say. And ask yourself in a non-snide way: What does any of this have to do
with me? Are their dreams much different than mine? Are their circumstances
much different than mine? If you’re really paying attention, the answer is not
likely to be obvious. And the payoff will be this: in ways that are impossible
to foresee, there will be, now or later, some shard, some story or premise or
memory that will buck you up, inspire you, give you hope. Your challenges will
always be unique, and yet at the same time never quite unprecedented. They may
also prompt you to ask some potentially useful questions, like: what are the
things I like and care about the most? What am I good at? What do I really
need? Given when and where I am, and given the resources at hand, how am I most
likely to get what I want?

To at least some extent, these are questions you’re already
asking yourself, even if they’re not exactly informed questions. Though we Americans have always liked to think
of ourselves as free agents with the power to choose our destinies (a phrase
I’ve always found rather odd), we of course are all products of people and
forces not of our own choosing. We have mothers and fathers; we hail from
particular places; we have inherited racial and religious (or non-religious)
backgrounds. Part of what it means to grow up is to self-consciously sort out
these inherited dimensions of our identities, accepting, rejecting, or adapting
them by our lights. This is one of the first things we do when we bond to our
mates: we relate our histories in terms
of our choosing. This of course is an ongoing process: to live is to
revise, and we live after our deaths to the extent that our survivors continue
to revise us on their terms. But –
and this is crucial – implied in the word “revision” is an understanding that
there remains some essence that makes our memories something other than entirely
new.

We need that. We need to believe in the reality of past
experience as something that is not entirely a product of our imaginations.
Without it we feel rootless. Even when, as is sometimes the case, we experience
our history as oppressive, as a trap, we may still find value in having
something to fight against, a storyline to reject. Insofar as we ever break
free from a history that haunts us, our liberation takes the form of finding a
different history, an alternative precedent, which we can adopt as our own.
This is why the recovery of lost characters, the recognition of people who
heretofore have not been considered part of the story, can be such an important
dimension of history: it gives the past a sense of relevance, the present a
sense of tradition, and the future a sense of possibility.

This is a sunny, pragmatic way of putting it. But then a
sense of optimism about history is something of an American family trait. In
our seemingly bottomless confidence in our own malleability, we like to believe
that the past, too, is subject to change. We may be a little foolish in this
regard; we may even be wrong. But if, as the great American philosopher William
James once said, truth is what happens to
an idea, perhaps we can go on believing it for at least a little while
longer. No one has proven we can’t.

But it’s hard to use a past you don’t know you’ve got.
That’s what history courses are for: not to teach you things you’re likely to
forget, but to remind you that you do
have a history, that you’re part of something larger than yourself. Some parts
of the stories you’re told will speak to you more directly than others; some
you may find boring or repellent. Not everything I say is interesting, because
it reflects my own configuration of memory, forgetting and ignorance. But part
of knowing who you are is knowing who you’re not, and that can’t really happen
unless you listen to what someone else is saying. That’s what schooling is: a
process of paying attention.

Which is why it can seem so taxing. What it really should
be is an investment. One you believe is worthwhile. Cash in the bank, fluency
in a foreign language, the ability to operate a weapon: these may be the things
that allow you to survive. But a
sense of history: that will allow you to live.

Okay, so that’s the end here. I don’t know if you will live in interesting times,
Miltonites. But, whether or not you do, may you, in the words of the immortal
Taylor Swift, dream instead of sleeping.

Friday, January 3, 2014

The following is the third segment of my 2013 Heyburn Lecture, delivered last month at Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. Previous segment below (after the Christmas post); a final post will follow.

Here in the twenty-first century, it’s more
apparent than ever before that the frontiers secured by the Second World War
are under pressure. In some places – places that are not obvious from the
vantage point of this beautiful campus, they’re actually collapsing. If you
read political journalism, this is something you’re told all the time. There’s
talk of debt, decaying roads and bridges, and foreign competition, whether
commercial or military. Closer to home, it’s something you hear in terms of how
challenging it is to get into a good college, how hard it is to afford any college, and how difficult getting a
job with health insurance is (government-provided health care was a possible
fork in the road the nation did not take after the Second World War). Your
country used to be the world’s leader with technology; now it seems that that
the airports or web connections are better abroad. You still think of your
popular culture as a global trendsetter, and yet there are movies and shows
with huge global audiences of which you know nothing.

One of the most obvious signs of this fraying – a sign that
often becomes apparent overstretched empires begin to contract – is inequality.
As those with privilege and power lose faith in their governing institutions
(or, alternately, manage to wriggle free of its reach and create exceptions for
themselves, which is another side of the same coin), the gap between haves and
have-nots grows wider. Taxes are for suckers; it becomes more realistic to fend
for yourself, which may mean buying your security privately rather than relying
on communal resources. Governance becomes more difficult, and the appeal of
leaders promising to slice through the ambiguities becomes ever more seductive.
The seeds of dictatorship are sown in the soil of gridlock.

All this has been happening for a long time: people were
saying such things back when your parents were children. Economists have been
telling tell us for decades that the value of paychecks have been retreating
and the price of things like fuel – and the cost of its consumption on our
environment – have been rising. And yet in many respects, concerns about
decline were premature then, and, at least for the moment, they seem premature
now, because whatever the tremors you may be feeling or seeing, there doesn’t
seem to be any large-scale changes you can easily see. And for the moment, at
least, you’ve got a college degree in front of you. Your immediate horizon is
what will happen in the next four or five years. And since there’s no obvious
sign the world will implode before then, the smartest thing is to do is act as
if things will pretty much go on as they have before.

Of course you know nothing lasts forever. But in your heart
you can’t quite believe that things will be fundamentally different in the
foreseeable future. The rhythms of everyday life – of work and school, of
getting and spending, of trying to figure out what you want so you can go chase
after it, because as an American the legitimacy of chasing after dreams is your
birthright, even if you happen to have been born someplace else – have not
changed fundamentally in generations. Yes, of course, there are collective
setbacks: bad economic times, natural disasters, moments of political
uncertainty like a government shutdown or a looming debt ceiling. But the
expectation, and, to a great extent, the reality, is that things return to
normal, however boring, unfair or reassuring normal may be.

But, in the hope it may be of some value to you, I’m going
to make the educated guess that times will be getting more interesting. Not
immediately, and not in ways I or anyone else can easily foresee. But it defies
every notion of history that its elusive but nevertheless real rhythms can be
entirely defied. Nothing is permanent, least of all stability.

This is not meant to be a prescription for doom. For all
you or I know, you will be in a position to prosper from instability (or, to
use a word much-beloved by some businesspeople, “disruption”). You’ll have a
skill – a language, a trade, a personal trait – you can exploit to good effect.
Or you’ll find a literal or figurative haven in which to ride out any storm. Or
maybe you’ll just enjoy the excitement; there are always people (typically
young men) who do. In any case, storms don’t arrive or move with uniformity.
They’re hard to predict, and historians have never been noted for their power
to forecast the future.

Given all this, you may well wonder just how it is I can be of any use to you. I make some
maddeningly vague assertion that times will change, and an equally vague
assertion that you may or may not prosper amid that change. What makes my
suggestion all the more implausible is that I’m telling you that history – of
all things! – will be useful to you. Not some technical skill. Or some
techniques for dealing with people more effectively. But knowledge about things
that have already happened: that will
be valuable.

About King's Survey

King's Survey is an imaginary high school history class taught by Abraham King, a.k.a. "Mr. K." Though the posts proceed in a loosely chronological fashion, you can drop in on the conversation any time. For more background on this series, see my other site, Conversing History. The opening chapter of "Kings Survey" is directly below.

“The Greatest Catholic Poet of Our Time . . . Is a Guy from the JerseyShore? Yup,” in The Best Catholic Writing 2007, edited by Jim Manney (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2007)

“I’s a Man Now: Gender and African-American Men,” in Divided Houses:Gender and the Civil War, edited by Nina Silber and Catherine Clinton (Oxford University Press, 1992).

THE COMPLETE MARIA CHRONICLES, 2009-2010

Most writing in the vast discourse about American education is analytic and/or prescriptive: It tells. Little of that writing is actually done by active classroom teachers. The Maria Chronicles, like the Felix Chronicles that preceded them (see directly below), takes a different approach: They show. These (very) short stories of moments in the life of the fictional Maria Bradstreet, who teaches U.S. history at Hudson High School, located somewhere in metropolitan New York, dramatize the issues, ironies, and realities of a life in schools. I hope you find them entertaining. And, just maybe, useful, whether you’re a teacher or not.–Jim Cullen